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Religion

The New Deal’s Southern Shrine

Religion and Memory at FDR's Little White House

by Darren E. Grem

The Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, represents a site of southern religion atypical in origin and memorial expression, and overlooked in studies of the modern religious South. Unlike sites dedicated to other venerated persons across the region, Bible Belt evangelicalism did not shape memory onsite. Rather, a combination of state authorities, New Deal liberals, and FDR enthusiasts—white and Black—transformed the Little White House from the President’s former vacation home into a memorial with sacred particularities, including relics, iconography, and rituals. A southern shrine to FDR and the New Deal resulted. It aimed to eternalize one of the New Deal’s most idealized economic spaces (the private home) while embodying liberalism’s domestic goals and racial limits. The New Deal’s physical infrastructure, especially improved roads, made access to Warm Springs easier than ever, enabling the shrine’s popularity for visitors and tourists while creating the potential for heartfelt pilgrimage and fantastical claims. Within just a few years of opening to the public in 1948, no site in the South operated quite like the Little White House. It showed that New Deal liberalism could be more than a political apparatus or economic framework. It could live on as memory via religion.

This is an abstract. Read the full article for free on Project Muse.
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